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The Guides Must Be Crazy
| Article
# : |
11274 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
4,684 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is the author of Island Gods, Whitewater
Adventure, and Riding the Dragon's Back, which won the
Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of 1989. He
is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an international
travel-adventure company, which has become part of Mt.
Travel-SOBEK. |
"Those who are wise or think they are, aimlessly repeat that it is madness to face such fatigue, to risk one's life to visit those deserts; a mysterious attraction draws us there and there are always men to undertake such pilgrimages toward the unknown. Many of them do it again and again, in spite of danger, fatigue, hunger or thirst. It is a passion similar to gambling."
--Viollet-le-Duc, 1870
The precise ideological tincture of this exercise is escaping me. I'm in a world of white, inching along a knife-edge ridge that sheers one thousand feet in one direction, nine thousand feet in the other. Does it matter which way I fall? I think I must resemble an ant negotiating the tractionless rim of a bathtub. My head is a bit dizzy, my breathing sharp, and my senses mentholated from the vistas. But I'm OK, I keep reassuring myself.
Then, as I take a step, my right crampon snags the left leg of my baggy trousers and rips the inseam. For a second, I lose balance and blood rushes to my head. Grabbing some composure, I continue the climb. I'm too frightened to take my eyes off my feet, but, when we stop for a rest, I allow a glance upward. Just three miles ahead looms a gleaming white whale breaching a sea of ice, the 15,771-foot-high peak of Mont Blanc.
This is the mountain that has claimed the lives of more climbers than any other in the world, over two thousand to date. Through the back of my head, I know there is a view of the Matterhorn, but I don't dare take a look. A few steps later, the crampon again bites into my pants, and catches, and I start to drop into space. The rope goes taut; I collapse onto my knees and instinctively bury the wrong end of the ice ax into the snow. I'm sprawled, spread-eagled, over this arête, panting like a hot chicken, terrified.
But Serge turns to me and says in a thickly accented, magic flute of a voice, "Don't worry. Take your time. Everything is fine. You're really doing great!" Hah, I say to myself, he's a guide. I know those words. They're not sincere, they're part of the shtick. I've used them myself hundreds of times. Nonetheless, I feel better, more secure, as he repeats them, and I find myself standing up, mustering new confidence, and giving him the thumbs-up sign that we can continue.
In another thirty minutes, I can smell the breath of the twentieth century diesel. We're safely making the final steps up to
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